


Burning Flowers

by seanache



Category: Deadpool (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: Adoption, I made most of this BS up, M/M, can you tell, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:58:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seanache/pseuds/seanache
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The word "uncharacteristic" could never apply to Wade Wilson.  He had no character to speak of, and if actions are stars that can be connected to form a discernible constellation, well, then Wade was a super-fucking-massive-blackhole.</p><p>But if there is one thing that one might have been able to call slightly "uncharacteristic" of Deadpool, then it was caring for the welfare of another human being.  For the welfare of anything, really, but especially for that of a tiny, doe-eyed kid with slightly creepy spider-powers.</p><p>So, why HAD he rescued the cute little bastard from an evil research lab with an objective eerily similar to the government testing that had given him an accelerated healing factor--and had inadvertently made him batshit fucking crazy?</p><p>Hell if he knew--he's batshit fucking crazy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. It Needs to Disappear

**Author's Note:**

> My first Spideypool work, and also my first fan-write in quite a few years.  
> I hope it's actually better than it seems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I just added a few more words to make it a little less suck-y. I'm also working on chapter two, and hopefully it'll be way longer.

It wasn’t often that S.H.I.E.L.D. took to hiring mercenaries--especially if those mercenaries were as careless and destructive as Deadpool.  

Yet, it was S.H.I.E.L.D. that called Wade Wilson out to New York City for his carless and destructive services...with promises of cash and the possibility of much blood-letting.  The small conference room where he now stood was located on one of the various floors of S.H.I.E.L.D. Central.  Nick Fury himself was on the opposite end of the room, standing with a soldier’s repose in front of the large floor-to-ceiling window that looked out upon the bright morning skyline of New York.

Maybe he should have been suspicious about being asked to fly halfway across the world from his previous job in Budapest, but he figured that if S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to bring him in for some dastardly deed he had committed, then they would have sent the Shield Slinger or maybe even Iron Hefner after him. That was the thing about heroes--they’re so damn _honest_.

Wade could have appreciated how heroic old Nicky looked as the sunlight caught the silvering of his brown hair, but he had been standing silently in the conference room for what felt like centuries (which really was only about five minutes), and the swively office chairs scattered throughout the room offered a much more interesting occupation.  He rolled back and forth across the room, kicking chairs as he went, singing the falsetto version of a song about hips and seeing them swing.

“Wilson!”

The deep, unchallenged authority that rang in the note bade Wade to cease his antics. So, he rolled over to the table, his posturing reminiscent of a fifteen-year-old in after-school detention.  Fury was facing him now, his stiff-and-proper drill sergeant act joined by a severe scowl.  Wade seemed to study him appraisingly, nodding his head to critical comments that only he could hear.

“Hey, Nicky, if you lost a coupla teeth and got a parrot, you could totally pass for a pirate, what with the eyepatch and all.  I know a guy who could get you a parrot.  Is that why I’m here?  ‘Cause we totally coulda done all this jazz over the phone instead of flying me all the way out to the Big Apple to watch the sunrise together,” Wade rambled, watching as Fury moved to a thin manila folder laying on the table.  He slid the folder over to Wade, who let it slide carelessly into his lap.  It fell open, revealing blurry photos of your typical New York alley, and a few slips of paper marked with the characteristics of a field report, albeit devoid of any timestamps, names, or fancy S.H.I.E.L.D. headers.  Wade caught the word “experiments” before he lifted his masked face to Fury.

“ _This_ is why we’ve called you, Wilson.  About two months back, one of our agents heard whispers of a lab hidden here in New York.  We found it, and for weeks we’ve had agents watching as men disguised in various blue-collar attire have wheeled in equipment that has no business being anywhere outside of a government testing facility.”

The mention of “government” and “testing” urged a few flashbacks to slide un-easily into Wade’s mind. Bright lights seemed to flicker overhead, and two eyes outlined by the mask and cap of a doctor peered into his own.  His scars burned in response, hot and angry beneath his costume.

{Are we Harry Potter now?  Is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Maimed close at hand?}

[You have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s _Named_ not _Maimed_.]

{Is there a difference?}

As usual, Wade ignored the pain of his scars and the bickering of his boxes.  He looked at Fury coolly, or as coolly as a man in a red-and-black scuba suit can.

“So?” He shrugged,  “Maybe it’s just some friendly neighborhood scientists trying to solve the age-old question of Which Taco Sauce Triumphs Over Them All?  And even if their deal is some sort of illegal Frankenstein shit, then why’d you guys call me?  Do you want me to go undercover or something, because I’m not really up for anymore voluntary bodily disfigurement.”  

Fury spared him a scathing glance before he returned to the window.

“This isn’t a joke, Wilson.  What it is we think these scientists are doing...it can’t get out, and we can’t involve the Avengers or any S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in this matter.  It needs to disappear,” looking over his shoulder at Wade, Nick Fury suddenly looked as if he had been fighting a war with himself over the words he spoke now.  “I know that if we pay you enough, you can make it disappear.  You may be the Merc with a Mouth, but we both know that money is the one thing that can shut you up.”  Fury lifted a suitcase that had been hidden behind the other end of the table.  He set it with a heavy thunk in front of Wade, unlatching the top and revealing its contents.

Wade considered the inside of the case, scratching his chin as if in deep thought.  Fury cleared his throat expectantly--and dare Wade say it, nervously--and moved away from the case.

“Well?  Can I trust you to get it done?”

The mercenary shrugged carelessly, closing the case and rising to face the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

“If it were me, I wouldn’t trust me as far as I could throw me, but for this much, I’ll do whatever the hell it is you want me to do, and I’ll throw in a free blowjob.”


	2. The Dark Beginning That Tends To Create Superheroes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ick. It has been too long and this chapter is much shorter than I wanted it to be, but I've been travelling and sniveling so I figure I'll give you what I have.

There were all kinds of people in the world, Wade mused as he sat atop the roof of a parking garage that overlooked the alley where some very evil little lab-monkeys had made their very evil little nest.  

[Do monkeys even nest?]

{Uh, duh.  In their poo!}

[If I don’t know, then you wouldn’t know, so shut up.]

And some people were very fucked up in the head--he could attest to that--but what kind of fucked-up-in-the-head asshole charged five dollars to get into a parking garage?

{We don’t even have a car!}

[That’s because we steal them.]

Sure, he could have scaled the building easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, but it was the principle of the matter that urged him to argue with the pudgy, red-faced toll-booth operator about how ridiculous it was to charge a man five dollars to get into a parking garage.  Especially when that man had various pointy objects strapped to his person and little-to-no scruples about using them.

Needless to say, he hadn’t paid any parking fee, and had even gotten the guy to tell him about the monkeys hanging around the building next door.

“I-I only see a few people every once in awhile,” he stammered, his buggy eyes glued to the business edge of Wade’s katana pressed to his third chin.  “Big guys.  Look like movers, if you ask me, and that’s just what they do.  They wheel these big crates into the garage, and then they leave.  Sometimes, I see some nerdy-lookin’ guys go in through the side-door, but that’s it.  I’m at home during the day, sleeping.  I don’t see nothin’ then.”  

Sweat from the man’s fleshy jowls had begun to gather on Wade’s blade at that point, and he could almost feel how hard poor Porky was praying for Wade to believe him and leave.

When the police came--and they would, after Wade blew the place to high-heaven--he was sure ole’ Porky wouldn’t mention the spandex-clad maniac that had interrupted his nightly duty of scamming poor schmucks out of their hard-earned money for a scrap of cement.  Most people tended to forget about Deadpool...or blocked him out.  It might have hurt his feelings, if it hadn’t been such a blessing for his business.  

A van pulled into the alley, moving slowly to avoid the dumpsters and various refuse littering its path.  Two burly men exited a steel door at the end of the alley, a suspiciously body-shaped bundle held between them.  The van stopped as the men approached, and the back doors opened from within to allow them to heave their burden into the van.  Wade watched the exchange with interest.

“These are some very naughty monkeys,”  he murmured, still aware of his current need for stealth.  “No wonder Fury’s panties are in such a twist.  People being killed in the name of science?  Using government equipment? If the public ever found out, there’d be maythem, mass hysteria, and a bunch of paranoid shut-in’s posting a bunch of “I-told-you-so’s” on /r/conspiracy.”

{Sounds like our kind of party.}

[We could throw an even better party with the money Fury is paying us to crash this one.]

{Oh! Maybe we could get that one sketchy Mexican-food van to cater it!}

“It would be a chimichanga orgy of epic proportions,” he added as the van drove away and the two men slipped back inside the door.  There wasn’t a keypad, nor any sort of lock he could see, which meant that either these were sloppy lab-rats (which he doubted on account of the earlier body-disposal), or the real security was inside.  The decrepit brick warehouse didn’t seem like it could safely house even a small-scale meth-lab, let alone a Weapon Plus-copycat deal.  All of the important stuff--the operating rooms, cells for the “test subjects,” and the evil-scientist equivalent of a breakroom--had to be underground.  Wade whistled a cheery tune.  Even if all of New York went dead silent, not even Porky would hear the gigantic explosions happening just below his feet.  He swung his legs over the edge of the roof, and without further ado, leapt to the ground below.

“Down we go!

 

* * *

 

He could still hear Aunt May’s screams in his ears.  He could see Uncle Ben, lying motionless in a pool of blood in the corner of his cell, his dark eyes frozen wide in terror.

“Peter!” She had screamed as five men cloaked in black surrounded her, their guns that seemed so enormous to him pointed at her chest. “Please! Please, don’t hurt Peter! He’s just a little--”

Peter never heard her last words.  Along with her voice screaming his name, the shot that had killed her echoed in his head, and before he could say anything, before he could see the blood blooming on her chest like one of the roses in the flower shop below their apartment, before the muffled thump of her body against the floor could join his soundtrack of nightmares, Peter’s world went black.

When he awoke, he was blinded by a light shining overhead.  For a moment, it reminded him of the light above the chair at the dentist’s when Aunt May had taken him to get rid of cavity, but the dentist had given him sunglasses to protect his eyes.  The dentist had also given him a shot in his gums so he wouldn’t feel any pain, but now he felt as if he was being consumed by it.  The burning ache of it was somehow made worse by the frigidness of the air around him.  The cold seemed to be worse at his ankles and his wrists, but Peter realized that was because they were held in place by metal straps.  He tried to wriggle out of them, but the straps were too small for his joints to pass through.

“Cohn, the boy is awake.”

Peter whipped his head to the sound of the voice, soft and female.  He could just barely make out the figure of a woman, but her features, her clothes, even the colour of her hair were a shadowy haze.  He suddenly wished for his glasses, and his chest began to sting when he realized that what he really wanted was Aunt May and Uncle Ben.  He wished that what had happened back at their apartment was a dream.  He wished that the cold room and the burning pain was a dream, and that he was actually in the hospital right now with a concussion because he fell off his bike or some sill thing like that, and Aunt May would rush into the room complaining about how she had warned him that this would happen if he didn’t wear a helmet. She would run her delicate fingers through his hair, and smile warmly even if an exasperated sigh or two escaped her lungs.

A shadow fell over him, but the man that suddenly loomed above him looked nothing like Aunt May.  His head now obstructing the light, Peter could see the man’s face as only slightly blurred.  He wore glasses, just like Peter was supposed to, and his lips were thin and contemplative.  He spoke, and they barely moved with the words.

“How promising.  We expected that you would be unconscious for at least another three days.  Perhaps you will prove to be stronger than the others.”

Peter tried to speak, tried to ask this man, this “Cohn”, what he meant by “the others.”  Before he could, though, Cohn vanished from view, and Peter hoped he wouldn’t return for awhile.  For some reason, this man frightened him worse than the shadows that had broken into the apartment and taken his Aunt and Uncle from him.  His skin had prickled while Cohn was near him, and Peter felt it rise once more as Cohn appeared at his side once again, something small and metal halfway concealed by his hands.  As Cohn moved it closer to Peter’s body, he could see that the man held a syringe--much larger than those he had seen in the hospital.  The needle inched closer to his forearm, Cohn’s finger hovering over the depressor.  Peter willed his arm to move away, knowing that the dark green liquid inside the syringe wasn’t anything he wanted inside of his body, but the strap around his wrist held his arm in place. The tip of the needle lingered on his skin for a moment before piercing it, and Peter watching as the terrifying contents emptied into his veins.

Cohn handed the syringe to someone--presumably the woman from earlier--that Peter couldn’t see.  His eyes, as cold and steely as the metal binding Peter’s limbs, met the boy’s terrified stare.  He spoke again without shifting his gaze, but Peter knew it was to someone else.

“If he’s still alive come this time tomorrow, move the boy to a monitoring cell.”

Those words only furthered his fear, but If he said anything else, it was lost to Peter as red exploded before his eyes in a horrible blast of pain.  The bindings at his wrists and ankles held them in place as the rest of his body lifted from the table where he lay, writhing in agony as lava seemingly replaced the blood coursing through him.  He could hear screaming, but didn’t recognize that the sound came from his own throat.  Aunt May’s voice filled his ears once more, calling Peter’s name from behind the shadows.

Once again, Peter’s world went black. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna go back and edit this when I can make myself stop being a butt.


	3. Sticky Situations All Around (Do not judge this title)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought that almost three-thousand words would be huge chapter, but it doesn't look as big as I thought...
> 
> Please don't hate me for how long this took and how crappy it is because you'll never be as good at hating me as I am at hating me...however, with over seven-hundred hits, I'm a little bit more motivated to continue with this! You're all so wonderful!
> 
> And I'd like to give special thanks to tumblr user spideypoolfanfics for posting my story on her blog! (At least, I have assumed she's a girl, but if he's a boy and a spideypool fan, he just might be receiving my marriage proposal in the mail soon.) She always re-posts the most amazing Spideypool fan-writes on her blog, and is probably one of the reasons I was able to begin this story.
> 
> Ahhhhh...enough with the chattiness. On with the show.

            The bright, unnatural whiteness that affronted his eyes when Peter finally awoke led him to believe he was dead.  The sharp, completely natural pain that slammed around inside his skull laughed at that joke, and maybe its new-found glee was the reason Peter’s temples began to really throb in earnest.  As he pressed his small palms to his forehead to try and soothe the ache, he tried to force his eyes to ignore the distraction and focus.  He knew that without his glasses he wouldn’t be able to see much, but still blinked his large brown eyes furiously.  The whiteness began to gain an edge to it that meant it wasn’t the all-encompassing light of death he had seen in movies and on T.V., but a room only slightly smaller than his bedroom back at the apartment.  His bedroom with its blue-sky walls and Captain America bedspread that Aunt May and Uncle Ben had given to him just last Christmas, still hiding behind the guise of Santa even though Peter hadn’t believed in the anti-burglar since he was five.  He never could muster up the heart to tell Aunt May he was too old for such things. And now he never would.

            Peter forced down the gag of spit and sorrow that climbed into his throat. Maybe no one would blame a nine-year-old boy for crying after what he’d been through, but Aunt May wouldn’t want him to cry.  Aunt May would shush him gently, run her fingers through the thick mess of his hair and tell him not to waste time on crying.  He needed to escape, to get as far away from this horrible white room as possible, and crying wouldn’t help him.

            Peter looked at his surroundings carefully, starting with the cot beneath him.  It wasn’t a cot really, so much as a mattress on the floor, without a blanket or even a pillow.  With some relief, Peter realized that no part of his body was strapped to it, nor was he hooked up to any machines.  He was wearing a white pajama top and bottoms that covered his feet when he stood.   The only thing that broke the congruous whiteness was the wall made entirely out of glass, only to look out on a white hallway.  Peter pressed his face against the glass and saw endless whiteness in either direction, only to realize that something was off. He backed away from the wall, and held his hand in front of his face.  He could see it perfectly.  He extended his arm out as far as he could, and run it up and down.  His hand never blurred, and looking around once more he realized nothing else did either. 

            Cohn and his syringe of green liquid reared into Peter’s memory, and he wondered if the shot was what fixed his eyes.  Aunt May once said that Peter’s vision could be corrected with surgery, but that it involved lasers and couldn’t be done until he was older because it could be painful.  Whatever Cohn had given him, even if it did fix his eyes, was wrong.  Strapping Peter to a table and then putting him into this room was very wrong.  Killing Uncle Ben and Aunt May and destroying Peter’s entire life was the worst wrong that could have ever been done, and Peter wanted to see it right.  He wanted the shadows with the guns, the nurse, and Cohn to hurt as much as he did.  He wanted to take the guns from those bad men and shoot them just like they shot Uncle Ben, standing in front of Peter and Aunt May with his arms out in front, trying to save them.  He wanted to take Cohn’s needle and stab him until his screams drowned out Aunt May’s in Peter’s head, and then he wanted to lock Cohn in the dark until he shook just as hard as Peter did now with anger, but Peter wanted him to shake with fear. 

            He curled his small hand into a fist, his short nails digging crescents into his palms, and he swung it at the glass wall with the weight of his entire body.  His knuckles connected hard enough that a cry spilled from Peter’s lips, but the glass didn’t as much as shudder. He swung again, and again, until finally his fist fell open and in frustration he smacked it against the glass.  He used his arm to hold himself up as a sob clenched his stomach into knots. 

            When he could force back the tears and make a more reasonable attempt at escape, Peter moved to push away from the glass, but his hand stayed where it was.  He tried to yank his arm away once more, but it was as if his palm was stuck to the glass.  For a moment, he wondered if there was some kind of magnetic force-field connected to the glass like in comic books he had read, but the thought was impossible.  The glass was strong enough to hold up against his punches, but his fist hadn’t stuck when it connected.  He gripped his wrist with his other hand and pulled, willing his palm away from the wall.  He fell backwards; his newly free hand scrambling to take the impact before his head could hit the floor. 

            There was a stinging in his wrists and then suddenly Peter was upright, once more facing the glass.  His wide brown eyes lifted to where what looked like a white thread stuck itself to the glass, and traveled back to where the thread not only connected to his wrist, but _came out_ of it.  Gingerly, he touched the thread with his other hand, and shuddered when his fingers stuck to it.

            “Ew,” he whispered in shock, “it’s like touching a big spider-web.”

 

* * *

 

            {Be very very quiet.  We’re hunting wabbit.}

            [More like _lab-rat._ ]

            “Shh!”

            Wade was crouched along a corner, dead bodies littering his path.  No one heard him as he slit the necks of three security guards on his way in, so no one would hear his boxes as they chattered amongst himself, but they still made it difficult for him to focus.  There were at least seven more security guards in the hall before him, along with two rooms filled with a bunch of bony scientists in white lab-coats, all probably pushing glasses up onto the bridge of their birdy noses and squawking about whatever evil experimenty things they were doing.  The security guards were outfitted in all black and studded with Kevlar, the rifles held at their sides packing enough heat to make Wade break into a sweat.  Sure, they could turn him into Swiss cheese and Wade would still be able to make a guts-sandwich out of them, but getting shot _hurt_.  Not to mention the fact that gunfire would draw more attention than Wade parading through the halls in a bikini, and that would give anyone who heard it time to escape from the underground laboratory with their lives and whatever precious research they could carry.  Fury wanted everyone inside dead and was paying Deadpool a fortune to do it exactly as he wanted it done.  If Wade could pride himself on anything besides his rock-hard body and charming wit, it was his ability to be the most fantastic fucking mercenary in the business.

            [What about Hit-Monkey?  The little prim-asshole has killed us a few dozen times and he’s still alive to “ooh ooh aah aah” about it.]

            {It’d make us a monster if we killed a monkey in a suit! He even carries little monkey-guns! The cuteness distracts us from slicing his brains up every time!}

            [And it gets our brain blown out every time.  What does it say about a mercenary when he can’t even murder a monkey in cold blood?]

            Wade watches the security goons patrol the hallway some more, stifling the yawn that threatened to stretch his face beneath the mask.  He reached into a pouch on his utility belt, his fingers feeling for a familiar object.

            “Maybe it just says that I like my blood hot and on fire?”  He says in a theatrically low and sinister tone, a detonator loosely clenched in his palm.

            {Aw yeah! Extreme explosion time!  This is what we signed up for baby! Push that button and let th--}

            Wade cuts himself off as he flips a small switch and holds his breath in anticipation of the _boom._ The walls shake with the impact of twenty pounds of C-4 combusting into a violent wrecking ball of mayhem and chunks of the ceiling fall around him. Through the banging of his doldrums, he can just faintly hear the satisfying sound of shocked screams as more booms echo the first huge explosion, the charges he’d set hours earlier now going off without a single hitch.

            [I think this might be the first time we haven’t blown any of our own extremities off.]

            {Isn’t it disappointing?  We never get to see anyone else’s arms fly off ‘cause of all the smoke! The limb-flying is the best part!}

            [Except for the time our severed dick landed in that little girl’s ice cream cone.]

            {Hey, that one is on Mister Sinister and his exploding Gambit clones.  At least we saved her from certain death.}

            As Wade brushed drywall and cement from his shoulders and looked around at the damage, he figured certain death was what had been dealt to anyone in the vicinity of the blasts.  Once he blew the building above to the ground, no one would ever find the bodies five floors beneath the rubble.  He’d been careful enough with the explosives upstairs that any inspector in the city would deem the building’s collapse as an inevitable result of years of decay. Still, not everyone in the lab was dead yet.  Their only escape was the elevator he had come down on, and no one was getting past him alive.

 

* * *

 

            Peter had figured out how to crawl onto the ceiling when the alarm went off.  It was loud, yet contained, like listening to music through headphones, but not so much of a sound as a feeling.  He knew it wasn’t the alarm of wherever it was he had been taken, but something inside his head telling him that it wasn’t safe.  Looking to the glass wall, he could see it shaking ever so slightly, and remembered how it hadn’t so much as moved when he punched it.  With a mix of instinct and calculation that surprised himself, Peter dropped from the ceiling and leaned the mattress up against the wall.  He thought it would be too heavy for him at first, but it was like lifting a feather-pillow.  He wriggled into the space created by the tent of wall and mattress, and barely seconds later heard what seemed like an enormous explosion.  The glass wall shattered as the blast hit, shards flying into the room faster than bullets and embedding deep into the mattress.

            Peter clutched his ears, willing the ringing to stop so he could hear enough to judge whether or not this was his chance to run.  He shoved the mattress aside and stood.  Glass covered every inch of the floor and crunched beneath his feet as he moved to peer out of the huge gaping hole in the room.  The hallway before him was no longer white, stained by soot and darkness when the explosion blew out some of the lights.  Peter couldn’t hear anyone, whether it was talking or screaming in pain.  Either he had been alone in the first place, or everyone besides him was dead.  Peter imagined Cohn, lying bloody and burned across his metal examination table, and hoped it was the latter.

            He passed through the hallway and into another, his new “sense” alerting him anytime a bit of ceiling wasn’t safe to pass under, or when a door only led to a room filled with fire.  He’d come across no one but scorched bodies since leaving what he’d come to think of as his cell.  Some of the bodies were dressed in coats like a doctor would wear, while others wore the same white pajamas as him.  Peter had no idea where he was, or how to get out.  Wherever it was, he thought he could cross Area 51 off the list since no one in any sort of military uniform had shoved a gun in his face and asked him what he was doing there.

            “Hey, kid, what are you doing here?”

            The weird tingling in his head started again, and Peter could have eaten his words if the barrel of a gun hadn’t been so close to his mouth.  Really, the planet Mars was too close where Peter and the distance between him and a gun were concerned, but at the moment he was too scared to hope for anything more than a few feet.  The hand at the end of the gun was gloved in red in black that continued up the arm, that connected to a chest muscled in a way Peter had only ever seen on the wrestling shows Uncle Ben used to watch.  The man in front of him was taller than any wrestler Peter had ever seen, taller even than Uncle Ben or the principal at his elementary school, and the mask he wore looked like something a hero in one of his comic books would wear.

            When Peter remained silent, the masked man wove the gun in his face and spoke like he was talking into a radio.

            “Earth to brat, come-in brat, do you read? Or even speak English? I speak many other languages, but I don’t have time to even list them all, so I’ll just speak slowly: Why. Are. You. Here?”

            Peter blinked incredulously; his focus no longer on the gun cocked inches from his forehead.

            “Are you a superhero?”

 

* * *

 

            He’d only gotten to shoot a few people so far, since most of them had been killed or mortally wounded in the explosion.  Wade held his pistol casually at his side, taking one more look around the lab to make sure everything was destroyed.  When he turned the corner and saw someone standing in the middle of the hall before him, the gun was instantly raised to eye-level, but no one was in his crosshair.  Perplexed, Wade lowered the gun, and when he did, the person was still there.

            “Holy shit, it’s a kid!” He muttered, his boxes harmonizing with equal mixes of shock and curses.  The boy didn’t seem to see him until Wade’s gun was in his face, asking him why he was there. Huge brown eyes traveled up the barrel to Wade’s masked face, the boy’s own painted with awe.

            The kid fluttered impossibly long, dark eyelashes and tilted his head to the side.

            “Are you a superhero?” He asked, the awe quickly turning into something that left a pit at the bottom of Wade’s stomach: hope.  “You are, aren’t you?  And you blew up this place to kill all the bad people.”

            Wade lowered his gun, more from the force of the boy’s excitement than any will of his own.  When he felt tiny arms wrap around his mid-section, he regretted not having the reassuring hunk of metal between him and the grateful hug he was now receiving.

            “You’re here to save me, right?”  The boy asked, his face buried in Wade’s stomach so that he felt the words more than heard them.  Without a conscious thought to, his hand found its way to the kid’s hair, thick and brown and soft like a kitten through his gloves.

            He remembered what Fury said about killing everyone he found inside; of course he did.  Surely though, _everyone_ didn’t include this kid.  It couldn’t. Captain Goody-Two-Shoes and his gang of Righteous Righters of Right would never permit the assassination of an innocent child.

            Only, Ol’ Nicky himself said that none of the Avengers knew about this lab.  And why would S.H.I.E.L.D. hire the most amoral mercenary in the business if they didn’t mean it when they said they wanted _everyone_ dead.  With one hand clenched around the handle of his gun and the other in the boy’s hair, Wade made his decision.

            “Come on, kid, I’m getting you out of here.”  He slipped the gun into its holster and lifted the boy into his arms.  He began to lope back the way which he knew led to the elevator, the boy’s arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

            

* * *

 

 

            As Wade ran from the building with a detonator in his hand and a child in his arms, he figured what was the point of being the most amoral mercenary in the business if he couldn’t do whatever the hell he wanted and not worry about the consequences?


End file.
